“He Suffers Because We Suffer”

Matthew 26:36-46

A Sermon Preached By

Rev. Peter W. Shidemantle

Palm Sunday Meditation

March 20, 2005

PEBBLE HILL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

5299 Jamesville Rd., Dewitt, NY  13214  Phone:  446-0960 FAX:  446-0672

phillchu@twcny.rr.com

            A mother and her teen-age son, who were having a lot of trouble communicating, were sitting together on a park bench.  They seemed to be living in different worlds, each entirely foreign to the other.  They kept passing by each other emotionally, not understanding one another.  Whenever they tried to talk, it always ended up in an argument.  Not an unusual thing.  You knew the love was there, but their love for each other couldn’t connect.  Hurtful things, hateful things, were said.  What got to him was something she said that finally connected.  She said, “Charlie, I’d rather cut off my arm than have you lose a little finger.”  He said, “You really mean that, don’t you?”

          I think there are few parents, and even few teenage daughters and sons, who would not understand that.

          During this Lenten season in our Soup and Scripture gatherings we have been considering the relationship of God and human suffering.  The author of the book we’ve been struggling with lifts up two different kinds of suffering.  One kind of suffering simply comes with being human.  As human beings, creatures of God’s creation, we live within the limits of time and space.  We suffer anxiety, fear and illness, and all the rest that comes with the human package.  He says this kind of suffering serves a good and necessary purpose for us, because true human fulfillment can only come through the acceptance of our limits.  To reach our potential as human beings we have to know and understand and accept what is beyond our reach.  But there is also the kind of suffering that is the result of human choices and decisions, represented by the biblical story of Adam and Eve and their fall from grace in the Garden of Eden, where the temptation to which they submitted - to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil - became both our blessing and our curse.  We are creatures who have free will, but the choices we often make are not for good, but for ill.  The temptation is to be like God - to possess, control and order life, rather than to receive it, day by day, as gift.  Untold suffering overtakes our world as the result of human decisions to control, to possess, to enforce, to kill. 

          And what is God’s relation to this?  God will not enforce God’s will at the expense of our freedom, choosing not to act in power but in love, to entice us by his love toward the true and abundant life of faith, and hope and love.  God weeps with God’s children at the suffering that befalls them, as Jesus wept over the city of Jerusalem before he entered it to the hosannas of the crowds that would in short order be calling for his execution.

          The whole story is called the Passion of the Christ - and we read only one of the scenes from the much longer story of those last hours before his death.  There is a long tradition in some Christian churches that on this day the entire account of the passion be read, with very little, if any, comment – to let the story speak for itself.  But, rather than read the entire 127 verses of the account of the passion in Matthew, we have lifted up one scene about a quarter of the way into it - the one where Jesus suffers in anticipation of the great suffering in another garden, the Garden of Gethsemane.  There he suffers the limitations of his humanity - with real tears and real agony, struggling with the decision between his will and God’s will, as we, too, acknowledge each time we pray, “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

          The brief comment is this: God our Creator, our loving Parent, would rather “cut off his own arm than for us to lose a little finger.”  To translate, God would rather give God’s own self, God’s own heart, to the pain and the suffering that humankind endures, not so we won’t have to, but precisely because we do.  That mom would gladly suffer to ease the suffering of her son, because of her love for him.  His knowledge of that love is what made the difference.  “You really mean that, don’t you?” he said.  In Christ, God not only means it, but shows it, at the greatest pain to God’s own self - the suffering that leads through death to life.   The way of the cross is the way of true life, because the truth of life is suffering, and the joy of life is not to avoid it, to run from it at all costs - to seek our own comfort and security, possess and control life - but to share in the suffering of others.

            The question of human suffering, and God’s relationship to it, is mostly asked by or on behalf of those victimized by it: “How could a powerful and loving God let this happen?”  But in and through this Holy Week we are invited once again to consider it differently – from the perspective, perhaps, of a mother’s heart, a father’s heart, the human heart – that is moved by pain of its own brokenness, not to retreat into itself, but who knows that the power of love is greater than the power of suffering and pain, so powerful as to endure it for the sake of another: who knows that this is the love with which God loves us, to death and through death.

Return to Ministries/Study/Prayer